The Great Game (1939)
Blurb:
My review:
A singular confusion of circumstance in the setting of the crimes obscured the uncalculated tangle of their development, the interference of passion with a subtlety of daring invention.
How many detective stories are set around churches and religion? Dorothy L. Sayers' Nine Tailors, Gladys Mitchell's St. Peter's Finger, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and H.C. Bailey's other attempts are the most successful. This one does not quite join those illustrious ranks.
There are many good parts to the story: Bailey's magnificent prose style and dialogue, often enigmatic, often poetic; the unusual and ingenious murder methods—electrocution, a deadly booby-trap using a car's petrol tank; Bailey's hitherto subdued flair for the physically grotesque, as opposed to psychological abnormalities—most notably, a church crypt coffin filled with blood-stained bones, serving as a bier for a corpse. The story is fast-moving and urgent, with a great variety of incidents—and that is where the story falls down. While the villain's identities are surprising (apart from the first murderer / second victim, whose guilt is revealed roughly 2/5 into the story), the ending is convoluted, the characters seem unsuited to their murderous rôles, and the ending is poorly clued.
Note that Mr. Clunk appears—we see his making a mockery of the court scene from the perspective of the police—and he merely seems annoying.